Tag Archives: Syria

Ten years ago, I was looking at the seaside of an English coast and saw a tanker with two anchors a mile offshore. I could not figure what it was doing. It was too close inshore to be emptying its tanks.

Ten years on and after reading an article today by Michael Peel in Brussels and Michael Stothard in Madrid (FT), I remembered that ship.

What if you could put migrants in ships in international or Mediterranean coastal waters?

We must be compassionate. Rather than cram them in and leave them to rot, Brussels could levy monies from EU members to teach these people a trade, IT, or seamanship and the languages of their choice. When they reach a certain examination standard, EU countries could take their pick of them as economic migrants. If they would like to take their skills back home, then that is a double winner.

David Cameron wanted to teach children towards a better life in Syria. It was a heartfelt idea, but impossible to implement in a beautiful country crushed to smithereens. So, migrant ships are one avenue. If anyone wants to jump ship, send them back. It may be tough to implement, yet it is an act of compassion for people who have paid thousands to traffickers and just need a break.

If you can give a people a purpose in life, you can grow a country back.

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Softly does it and this is what we are good at. Just as well that we have not attacked, as only now does Russia’s battleplan against Britain become apparent. Its soldiers have surrounded Douma in Syria and put it into lockdown.

Russia has now criticized the British directly of making up the chemical weapons’ attack in Douma. Russian Ambassadors have been trumpeting their innocence, even after we saw such sad images of poisoned children. Unfortunately for them, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has reports from similar agencies of up to 500 people affected by a chemical weapons’ attack in Douma and 60 lives taken.

The International Inspectorate for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has sent Inspectors to Douma. They will start work tomorrow 14 April, exactly a week after the chemical attack. Speculation says that Messrs Putin and Assad have had plenty of time to clean up the chemicals and their residue.

So the Russian soldiers are to be protected by Mr Putin, except it is rather that the West does not want to bomb the Inspectors. Luckily we have not attacked. We would have been condemned worldwide if something had happened to them. I hope that they have bodyguards.

It is not bombs that are needed, but escorts for foreign aid to be distributed in Syria. The British are good at protection, yet we are treading on eggshells around the US and the Russians. Why? How did we allow this to happen?

I would not like to have the US in my corner. Its President is volatile, unreliable and rapidly stopping his entry into war. Let the British go to war and the US can have its usual stance on the sidelines. The British will be the fall-guy and maybe after its destruction, Russia and America will come to the diplomatic table.

Russian pride has been deeply bruised, after no-one believed them when they were accused of using chemical nerve agents on British soil. The media says that there is clearly no other plausible explanation.

If the Russians are so innocent, why have they not tried to help children and the old with antidotes to the chemical attack?

Who and where are we supposed to bomb? It is ridiculous. Protect and build relationships; that is what we are good at on the world stage. To keep that ability, we must steer clear of Messrs. Putin and Trump.

I thought that Mr Trump wanted to keep his country safe and to give people better lives under his caretaking. This is a point where all politicians have trouble. They are not controllers of the world’s destiny; they are caretakers of it for the generation to come, the one after, etc.

I fully expected Mr Trump to take time and suggest more tourism around the States to make a happier population. The vacation resort islands of The Bahamas and the Caribbean need help and the US has its fair share of rebuilders.

What the population does not want is another war. No terrible weapons were found in Iraq, the Taliban was not quite eradicated in Afghanistan and is putting its head over the parapet again and Syria has been reduced to rubble. Their populations are scarred by war and have come to the West to help make them better.

America is hardly the friendliest of nations towards Europe. Americans talk of doing Europe: 22 countries in 21 days, oh and a hop to the UK. When we had foot and mouth disease in the south-west of England, every city dweller had to walk through disinfectant to enter the States.

Now the Pentagon has jumped into a volatile situation between two country leaders, to assure the President of its support; hardly what anyone needs at the moment.

To Messrs. Trump and Kim Jong-Un, please look to your countries. Your people have faith in you to promote its economy and to safeguard its citizens. In war, thousands will die. What for again? I have forgotten.

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I have come crashing down to Earth today. My view is naive and simplistic. Something I believed in for ten years has become a damp squib, has become unimportant and I look for enlightenment in other ways.

It’s just that war in Syria that upsets me. Everyone, whatever side, is obliterating a country. It is like someone dropped a bowling ball in a puddle. All the people have sprayed out to other places, unwilling to take them. They want to come to Britain as some sort of Utopia, but we are figuring how to progress. Saudi Arabia is considering sending ground troops.

The British cannot afford to pay for the bombs. Will the Chancellor take millions of low-paid people off welfare benefits and then use the money to pay for more bombs?

Could we have some lateral thinking here? Could women be part of a diplomatic solution? Wided Bouchamaoui and three men of Tunisia won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015. They brought peace to their own country. Please let them help here.

Someone identifies an oil well in Syria which is apparently being used as an income stream for ISIS. The Americans want to shut it down but they cannot possibly do it themselves because Russia, also with interests in the region, would see it as a declaration of World War Three. They need a fall-guy. Enter the British and their reliance on a daft special relationship. Their value to the Americans is being strategically placed between America and Russia.

Parliament discussed occasional airborne forays into Syria for a whole day. The Air Forces Minister told the media that they were not discussing airstrikes; they were merely discussing the possibility of making occasional forays into Syrian airspace. She let slip that the British were also making occasional airborne forays into other countries, Iraq, for example. I must have missed that in the media, because Britain is meant to be out of that war. We cannot keep going into countries and bombing them.

Then she went back into a parliamentary late-night sitting and the next thing we know is that RAF fighters and Typhoons take off in the early hours of the following morning. The British public later finds out that an oilwell in Syria has been bombed, ending an apparent income stream for ISIS. Let us hope that the Americans did not us looking for something that was not there or not happening.

What happened to NATO and the UN? Don’t they have a say in what happens? Surely better that than individual countries making their own decisions to bomb certain parts of these countries? Secondly, bombs are hugely expensive, both in themselves and in the consequence of the population leaving and wanting to come to Europe’s peaceful countries. One has to wonder, whatever next?